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“You Know Yourself, You're Not Gonna Do That”: How Modern Orthodox Teens Learn About and Navigate Norms of Sexual Contact

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“You Know Yourself, You're Not Gonna Do That”: How Modern Orthodox Teens Learn About and Navigate Norms of Sexual Contact “You Know Yourself, You’re Not Gonna Do That”: How Modern Orthodox Teens Learn About and Navigate Norms of Sexual Contact Senior Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Undergraduate Program in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies ChaeRan Freeze, Advisor In partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Bachelor of Arts By Ariella Levisohn May 2019 Committee Members ChaeRan Freeze Sara Shostak Darren Zinner Table of Contents Acknowledgments 2 Chapter One – Introduction 3 Sexual Education in Modern Orthodox High Schools: A Literature Review 9 Methodology 26 Overview of Chapters 33 Chapter Two – The Structure of Sexual Education 34 Chapter Three – Ideal Messages 60 Chapter Four – Student Beliefs and Behaviors 85 Conclusion 112 References 115 Appendices Appendix A: Tables and Charts 119 Appendix B: Consent Forms 126 Appendix C: Survey 142 Appendix D: Interview Guide 146 1 Acknowledgments This thesis is the culmination of almost two years spent brainstorming and talking to everyone about my ideas, from alumni of Jewish day schools to Brandeis faculty members. While I cannot possibly name everyone who contributed to this work here, I would like to explicitly thank a few people in particular. Thank you to my thesis advisor, Professor ChaeRan Freeze, who has been a consistent source of support and advice throughout this entire process. I am so grateful for all the time you dedicated to helping me with my research, despite all the crazy amount of things you already balance. I would not have been able to complete this project without you. Thank you as well to Professor Wendy Cadge, for helping me get started with this process, and especially for assisting me with negotiating the IRB process. Thank you to my committee members, Professor Sara Shostak and Professor Darren Zinner. I am so lucky to have been able to take both of your classes this past year. I have learned an incredible amount from each of you and I am so grateful to you for taking the time to read my work. A special thank you to the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute for enabling me to begin the thesis process over the summer as an HBI Gilda-Slifka intern, and for funding this research through the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Undergraduate Grant in Jewish Gender Studies. I would also like to thank Ms. Rena J. Olshansky, for establishing the Rena J. Olshansky ’56 Grant to Support Research on Jewish Family Life, which was essential in making this thesis possible. Both the HBI Undergraduate Grant and the Olshansky Grant allowed me to visit both Modern Orthodox day schools and administer my study in person, which was crucial for establishing a connection with the students and getting a better sense of each school’s culture. I would also like to thank the administrators, teachers and rabbis at both schools for allowing me to conduct research with their students and taking the time to help arrange the logistics of my onsite visits. Additionally, thank you to the 32 students who filled out the survey and the nine students interviewed for their honesty and thoughtful responses. To my father and fourth reader, thanks for connecting me to your endless contacts in the Jewish education world, for always pushing me to think harder and more deeply and for respecting my independence on campus. To my mother, thank you for constantly supporting me and reminding me that a good thesis is a done thesis. A huge thank you to all my family and friends who have supported me throughout this entire process and the last four years. None of this would have been possible without any of you. 2 Chapter One - Introduction As a senior at my pluralistic Jewish high school, neither I nor my friends knew much sex or sexuality. While we were offered multiple lessons on stress, mental health and illegal substances, the only sexual education I could remember from my four years at the school was a single one-hour session in which the entire tenth grade class was given a “tour” of different forms of contraception. While this was undoubtedly important, the session ended with blown up condoms on the floor and diaphragms left untouched in the corner. According to the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), sexual education is defined as: A lifelong process that begins at birth… Sex education should address the biological, sociocultural, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of sexuality within the cognitive learning domain (information), the affective learning domain (feelings, values, and attitudes), and the behavioral learning domain (communication, decision-making, and other skills). (“Issues | SIECUS,” 2018) While SIECUS identifies sex education as a “lifelong process,” I will focus specifically on sexual education within high schools. Unfortunately, my high school’s curriculum is not alone in neglecting to meet SIECUS’s criteria for sexual education. I cannot count the number of times I have heard a graduate of a Jewish day school bemoan either the harmful messages they received about sex and sexuality while in high school, or the lack of sexual education altogether. Limited or minimal sexual education is not just a problem in Jewish high schools, though. More broadly, schools across the United States struggle to adequately prepare their students for healthy relationships and safe sexual behaviors. The teaching of sexual education in schools has historically been a contentious issue across the world, and especially in the United States. Public schools today are still part of an ongoing national debate about how and when to teach sexual 3 education, and many remain under the influence of federally-funded abstinence-only programming (Greslé-Favier, 2010). The regulation of sexual education in the US has traditionally been left up to states, who in turn often give freedom to each school district to determine how and when to teach sexual education, if they decide to teach it at all. Despite this lack of direct regulation, the federal government plays a large role in funding sex education, which then influences what is taught in schools. As a result of campaigns led by the Christian Right created in response to the increased sexual activity of the 1960s and 1970s, federal legislation provides funding for abstinence-only sexual education in public schools. Between 2000 and 2009, Abstinence Only Until Marriage (AOUM) education received approximately $200 million a year in federal and state funding (Calterone Williams, 2011). While President Obama cut much of this funding, the Trump Administration has again begun to increase the budget for AOUM education, rebranded as “sexual risk avoidance education” (Boyer, 2018). Although 24 states and Washington DC currently mandate sexual education in public schools, as of 2014 fewer than 50% of high schools teach all “essential components of sex education” as recommended by the CDC (“State of Sex Education in USA | Health Education in Schools,” 2018). These critical sexual education topics include healthy relationships and communication; the efficacy, importance and correct use of condoms; factors that influence sexual risk behavior and how to avoid risky behavior; HIV, STDs and pregnancy, among others (CDC, 2014). Moreover, according to the Guttmacher Institute, the numbers of high school students receiving a formal sexual education is declining; between the CDC’s 2006-2010 National Survey on Family Growth and the 2011-2013 Survey, the number of teens who received formal education about birth control, HIV/AIDS and STDs decreased, while the number 4 who reported only being taught how to say no to sex and not about birth control has increased (“State of Sex Education in USA | Health Education in Schools,” 2018). This is the general picture of sex education in America: federal funding for AOUM combined with a trend towards fewer students and more limited scope. While federal funding and governmental regulation of sexual education does not directly apply to private schools, many of the abstinence-only messages as well as the general lack of formal sexual education can be found in Modern Orthodox Jewish schools as well. Although limited scholarship exists on if and how sex education is taught in religious Jewish schools, a number of articles written by alumni of Orthodox schools point to the dearth of comprehensive sexual education (Epstein, 2012; Krule, 2016). Moreover, a recent survey of North American Modern Orthodox Jews found that only 22% of parents agreed that their children’s Orthodox Day School does a good job of teaching sexual education (Trencher, 2017). Notably, within the last few years, some of these schools have made efforts to improve their sexual education, and some Jewish sexual educators have in fact put out their own curricula specifically geared toward Modern Orthodox schools (Ingall, 2015; Pollak, 2015). Still, whether due to religious values, lack of time or the absence of educators willing and able to teach sexual education, many of my peers who attended Modern Orthodox high schools came to college with limited knowledge of contraception, STDs and HIV/AIDS and consent, among other important topics. Motivated by the widespread lack of knowledge about sexuality I have observed among alumni of Modern Orthodox schools and a desire to learn more about how Jewish values are incorporated into sexual education curricula, I chose to focus my senior thesis on how students at Modern Orthodox high schools experience sexual education on a broader scale. 5 Currently, the scholarship that does exist on sexual education in Modern Orthodox high schools tends to focus on alumni of the schools. These articles tend to be thought pieces or blog posts that speak to individual experiences with sexual education and the ways in which sexual education did or did not accurately reflect the behaviors of students, both during high school and after graduation.
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